Woman v. Woman

12Apr

Can you hear it? It’s bubbling up again. There it is! The woman wars. Every so often (usually precisely timed to an election cycle) the media is abuzz with the ‘in the home versus outside the home’ battle. There are so many flaws in this campaign it’s difficult to know where to start. But I hardly see why that should slow me down.

There is no war – this is completely made up. Nobody cares what you (or I) are doing with our lives.

If I’m wrong (and it’s been known to happen) and there are snips and snarks and snide remarks, they are being made by people who feel insecure about their own choices. In other words, it is a very biased opining.

Semantics matter: “Working inside the home” means a person “works from home” – for money. It doesn’t make anyone’s efforts less worthy to properly identify them. Managing a household and perhaps children for no compensation is difficult and unrelenting labor and warrants its own term. It is confusing to use euphemisms such as “working inside the home” simply because we’ve become allergic to terms such as housewife and haven’t come up with anything better.

Where a woman spends the majority of her time has little to do with how she votes. Women can see the world as a larger place than what is directly in front of them.

When is it time for men to be pitted against each other in a fictional sophomoric war?

The whole point of feminism is freedom of choice. Women should be free to choose the life that works for them at any given point. Women should also be free from being a subcategory or manipulated to fulfill a stereotype. Women are not a numerical minority, but historically have had limited access to opportunities. Our country has a long history of creating fictional fracases within minority groups for the purpose of distraction. Eventually people do catch on.